Tutorial Tuesday - Magnetic Vypers

Just got back from a cross country trip back to the homelands of Illinois to visit various friends for various reasons. Along the way, I got to hang out with Dethtron, traveled over 2000 miles, got hit on by a gay dude, met a collection of drunk stupid bitches and went to a wedding. Also, another good buddy of mine's wife went into labor during the wedding ceremony.

All in all a good trip.

Importantly, for blogging, I drunkenly chatted with Dethtron about blogging and my relative lack thereof. Between a good conversation about Not Brent and a polite decline of my drunken offer to piggyback on his success, I learned something:

I spend too much time damn writing my blog posts. So, I'm gonna experiment. Instead of spending the hours (and hours) writing my posts, I'm just gonna try the shotgun approach. I'm just gonna write what comes to mind within an hour or so and limit my editing. You get more content, I get more practice and, hopefully, more readers.

Thus is born - Tutorial Tuesdays.

Every Tuesday, I'm going to try and hold myself to a goal of finding a great web tutorial on... something and then share. Kinda like what the Painting Corps do, only with swearing. The bonus here is that if I miss Tuesday, I can always have a Thutorial Thursday instead.

Right before I went on vacation, I was getting ready to paint some Eldar Vypes for the much overdo Project Future Boys. On the verge of permanently affixing the turret weapon, I suddenly remembered that I could probably use magnets or something to make the weapons swappable.

After a few minutes, I found this: The Magnificent Magnetic Vyper.

Beauty.

Overall, its a pretty good tutorial. I think it suffers a bit from what many web tutorials suffer from (my own included) - namely, poor photography and less than precise language. Good nonetheless.

Anywho, I ordered magnets and went on the trail of tears I call a nonstop drive to Illinois.

When I got back, my magnets had arrived and i got to work (after a nap).

Here are my Notes:

- I didn't bother with all the frou-frou of making the turret fully pose-able. I only did the bit where you can swap the weapons.

- I used the same magnet supplier as the poster - K&J Magnetics. They make all the sizes you'll need at a reasonable price.

- There is no such thing in K&J's stocks as a 1/16" dia x 3/16" long cylinder. Just go ahead and get a bunch of the 1/16" dia x 1/16" cylinders. You'll also need a mess of 1/16" dia x 1/32" discs.

- I also didn't use any greenstuff. I find it to be a pretty great option when you're filling joins and such on more organic or small parts. But pretty awful on flat surfaces and straight edges since it doesn't take well to sanding. I used Milliput, but any sandable putty will work.

- Back to that communication and precision of words issue - because of the magnet size that does not exist and some personal preferences with measuring and drilling, I had a significantly different approach to the weapon magnetization. See my kewl diagram.

- Be extra careful with your polarities. The goal is to have all the weapons be interchangeable so make sure all the magnets line up the same way on all parts before gluing. If you put the magnets in wrong, then the thing won't work.

- When gluing the magnets into the sides of the mount, I stick the 3 cylinders and the disk together and then push them all through the hole I made. This allows you yo check to make sure things are level and properly spaced before you glue.

- I added the disk magnets to the bottom of the weapon and the seat on the mount to increase stability. Its a good idea to do this part first before gluing on all the horizontal stuff as the side magnets will tend to grab the seat magnet.

- Do a bunch of Vypers at the same time to avoid confusion and save time.

That's all for now. Lets see how long I can keep up the pace.